


Loving Is A Gamble

by ivorygates



Series: Blues'verse [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Episode Related, Episode: s10e20 Unending, F/M, Fix-It, Girl!Daniel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-06
Updated: 2012-03-06
Packaged: 2017-11-01 13:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fight against the Ori hasn't gone on without them <em>(not yet)</em>; they can tell themselves it's still yet to be won, that Sam can still come up with some way to bring them <em>(to bring the Asgard database)</em> safely home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loving Is A Gamble

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in the same universe as "Blues Run The Game" and occurs before it.

Two decades have passed and it's still "now". They're trapped aboard _Odyssey_ like flies in amber, and the only thing keeping any of them even halfway sane is the knowledge that outside _Odyssey_ it's now, now, now, forever and eternally and unforgivably still "now". The fight against the Ori hasn't gone on without them _(not yet)_ ; they can tell themselves it's still yet to be won, that Sam can still come up with some way to bring them _(to bring the Asgard database)_ safely home.

Most of them, anyway. Because Jack is dead.

No burial at sea for _Odyssey's_ master and commander, either in the sea he loved or the infinite sea of space. The time-bubble hugs the hull too tightly for that. Instead (irony upon irony) his body is sealed into a stasis chamber that Sam persuades their replication equipment to create. It looks like a coffin. _(T'is enough, t'will serve.)_

The stasis chamber would hold a living body safely in near-eternal slumber. It's what the Asgard are using them for, an entire race choosing to sleep for millennia, leaving their monstrous computers behind them to work on the problem of reversing their genetic decay. _(Ding! Problem solved! Time to get on with our lives!)_

Dani wishes she could take that out. Follow her husband, if not into death, at least into oblivion. But all of them are needed to keep one another sane. With Jack gone _(Dead. Jack is dead.)_ their little commune has become psychologically unstable again. He held them together (back in the beginning) by sheer force of will, his belief that their problem could be solved. It was Jack who'd organized their days, badgered Vala out of her pretense she was nothing more than an empty-headed thief, insisted that with time enough _(and they have nothing _but_ time)_ the rest of them could learn enough about physics to be able to help Sam. He demanded they take up hobbies, exercise programs, create whole lives for themselves here on this miniature world.

Vala helped Sam more than she wanted anyone to know -- that agile ruthlessly-practical mind, able to survive fifty years as a host, turned to complex mathematics as just another tool of defense and escape. The rest of them tried, but Cam's not a genius _(and they needed more than genius)_ and Teal'c is brilliant in a vast collection of disciplines that don't include quantum physics. Fortunately Dani's been able to escape having to even try to become a physicist: her other skills are _(were, will be, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, selah)_ valuable enough: she's spent the last twenty years reading her way through the entire Asgard library. (Mostly trying to find things for Sam to look at, but still.) She hadn't wanted a hobby at all, and she successfully resisted one for three years (still holding out the hope that this was going to be _over soon_ ) but then at last she surrendered to Jack's silent badgering and chose one. Gardening. A hobby that was chosen primarily to allow her to _get as far away from the others as possible_. And stay there. 

She took over the entire cargo deck _(no cargo on this voyage)_ for her hobby. The flight deck would have been better, but Cam isn't reasonable when it comes to the 302s, and everyone knows it. So... the cargo deck. Where she lays down soil, plants grass, plants flowers, plants trees. It takes her _years_ , but by the time Jack dies, the gardens are a popular location on _Odyssey_. 

The only one who never visits them is Cam.

Dani isn't sure when she gave up hope that Sam could fix things. Long before Jack died, she thinks. _(Twenty years is a long time.)_ They'll all age and die here. The last survivor will set _Odyssey's_ self-destruct mechanism _(if there is a last survivor, if the stasis bubble doesn't simply pop from lack of power before they're ready to give up their respective ghosts)._ The explosion will rupture the time-stasis bubble if nothing else has. The Ori warships will probably think it was their attack that destroyed the ship.

She alternated between thinking that their island outside of time was a blessing and that it's a curse. She's had the chance to grow old with Jack, twenty years of sleeping and waking together. She's never seen Earth bowing down under Ori rule.

But... trapped.

And she worries about Cam.

They all do.

Cam is a pilot, a soldier, a leader of men. In another twenty years of service _(if he'd lived, the treacherous serpent-whisper says in her mind)_ he would have become what Jack already was. But he wasn't there yet when the six of them -- her and Jack and Sam and Teal'c and him and Vala -- were all trapped in _Odyssey's_ never-will-be neverland. 

From the very beginning, Cam has seen _Odyssey_ as a prison. In the beginning (years ago now, so long ago, a lifetime), he came up with plan after plan -- all reckless to the point of insanity -- to _end_ this. His fights with Jack were memorable. 

Cam's need to escape wasn't the only thing that fuelled them.

They all knew it (one of the ways you survive in an environment where you can't get away from your peers is by not telling everything you know). Because Sam and Vala and Teal'c had been with her and Cam on SG-1 for the two years before this, and Jack wasn't stupid. She and Cam had been dancing on the knife-edge of a tangled web of emotions (to really mix a metaphor) almost from the beginning. Affection. Attraction. Forbidden love in the most absolute sense of the phrase. In the outside world they could _get away_ from each other. And here ... they couldn't.

Of course she and Vala and Sam talked it over the moment it looked as if this was going to be more than a three-hour cruise. Three men and three women, and both Sam and Vala knew how long Dani had already waited for Jack. The question was (when General O'Neill bowed to the inevitable: Dani was giving it three months and she turned out to be off by a month) what -- or rather, _who_ \-- were Sam and Vala going to be doing? She'd been more than a little surprised to find Vala backing off from Teal'c and Sam backing off from Cam, and for the same reason, too. Too much like kissing your brother.

(She suspects -- though she's been careful never to find out for sure -- that the other two couples aboard _Odyssey_ didn't adhere as firmly to couplehood as she and Jack did. But she's always known that Vala wasn't in love with Cam.)

And now Jack is dead _(said the words, sealed the coffin; we shall not die, but shall all be changed; here lies Jonathan Jonah O'Neill in hope of the glorious resurrection to come; Jesus was a sailor)_ and _Odyssey's_ lost both pilot and lodestar _(and all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by)_ and she's lost more _(the faucon hath borne my make awa')_ and oh, the gods in whom she has never believed punish hubris more harshly than any other sin, and it was hubris to think this captivity didn't grate on her, because with Jack dead, dead and gone, this infinite realm has shrunk to a cockle shell, a walnut shell, and to display her grief would distemper the only universe there is _(the only universe there is for them),_ because while the others grieve for the loss of a friend and a comrade they've known for twenty and thirty years, _Jack was her whole world._

And now her world is gone.

She tells Sam she's coping. She tells Teal'c it takes time. Vala doesn't ask; Vala comes and sleeps with her at night. Dani knows she should throw Vala out, but the silence of the empty cabin (now hers alone) is deafening, and the bed without Jack in it seems infinitely large and cold. She still doesn't sleep well.

Cam doesn't ask either. She only sees him at meals. It was one of Jack's rules, that they all had to take all their meals together, and they all had to show up for every meal whether they ate or not. She'd thought it was stupid at the time. Without it, she suspects most of them would have gone mad years ago.

Not Teal'c, she thinks. And she's developed a great respect for Vala's psychological resilience over the years (half a century as a _Goa'uld_ host will give a person a few emotional coping skills). But the rest of them: her and Sam and Cam. 

(And Jack, only Jack is dead. She can ask the ship to conjure up a hologram of him; she can make it play back every second of their lives together here; she can watch a playback of their first wedding ceremony -- only the two of them were there; Jack thought _(then)_ it would send the wrong sort of message about their situation -- she can watch their second one, five years later; she can watch the two of them making love.) A week after the funeral Dani went to Sam to have her lock that function of _Odyssey_ away so that she couldn't access it, but not before she chooses five images of Jack to keep, and has Sam make them into photographs.

And now she walks the hallways and corridors of _Odyssey_ , wrestling with her grief the way Jacob wrestled with the angel. She thinks Jacob lost, but she isn't sure, and it's not as if the Asgard have the libraries of Earth in their database. Or as if any of them brought the libraries of Earth with them on what was supposed to be a month's round-trip there and back again. (A vacation, time off the line, because they'd been running flat-out for months and General Landry had despaired of getting downtime for them any other way.) Teal'c probably remembers. His memory is excellent. (Years ago they all began dictating as much of every book they could remember into the ship's memory. Partly for something to do, partly to be able to generate hardcopy for others to read. Though what possible use a complete copy (with diagrams) of "Chapman Piloting: Seamanship & Small Boat Handling (63rd Edition)" is going to be to anybody, she's sure she doesn't know. (And the arguments over the correct text of various Shakespeare plays... Well, at least they passed the time.)

Her days (no less so than before) have an unvarying similarity. She gets up in the morning, dresses, goes to the galley, has breakfast (would it have been better if _Odyssey_ hadn't been carrying technology indistinguishable from magic, technology that could create almost anything out of light and air and a (tweakable) sample? If it hadn't been, they would have starved to death years ago. But they have food, and even fresh food (more or less), and she owes her gardens to some tiny vials of sample seeds in one of the ship's labs, scanned and replicated infinitely), and after breakfast (now) she walks. At midday her watch chimes to summon her back for lunch, and then again (hours later) for dinner.

Cam is the youngest of them.

Jack was the oldest, at least if you're sticking strictly to _Tau'ri_. It's true that Teal'c was born in 1899, but Jaffa probably live more than twice as long as humans. It's hard to be sure (even Teal'c isn't really sure), because most Jaffa either died in battle (if male) or in an enemy raid on one of the worlds the _Goa'uld_ who owned them held (if female). (Or sometimes their "god" just executed them for fun; the _Goa'uld_ never had much concept of "responsible stewardship".) And now, of course, the Ori's Priors are wiping out whole populations of Jaffa because they won't convert to Origin.

Vala (she finally told them) was (at a wild guess and that's all it can be, not being able to compare her homeworld's planetary rotation to Earth's) a teenager when Qetesh took her as a host. She'd been free for about seven years the first time Dani met her, so she's been free for almost three decades now. It's anybody's guess how long her natural lifespan is going to be.

But Cam is in his fifties (she's five years older, and Sam is two years older than she is), and (Dani's had twenty years to hear stories of his family) the Mitchells are a long-lived brood. He could live well into his eighties. Or beyond.

Trapped here.

But aging patterns are only one aspect of the house odds (Jack always said the house won in the end). Sam's older than either she or Cam (and Dani knows practically nothing about her own genetics; for all she knows, all the Jacksons drop dead at sixty -- unless, like her great-uncle Norcross, they're taken as a host -- and all she knows about the Ballard line is that it seems to be predisposed to insanity, yes and no, more or less), and maybe Sam will live to be a hundred and nine and in full possession of her faculties the whole way.

Or maybe -- not this year, not this _decade_ , but soon -- Sam's brilliant mind will dim. Dementia (whatever the cause, however labeled) is something they can neither diagnose or treat. And without Sam working on the problem of getting the ship out of time-stasis and staying alive while they do it...

Game over without hope of pardon.

She's grateful, she thinks, that Teal'c will be the last survivor, though it's a terrible fate to wish on him. But he'll know what to do and when to do it. She doesn't want to think of Sam gone. She doesn't want to be left behind. Not again. _(And part of her wishes it could all be over now, and she knows that's why Jack took every weapon on board the ship -- rifles and pistols and zats -- and locked them up years ago, and now Teal'c's the only one who knows where, or how to get at them.)_

She's doing what she always has when faced with the unbearable. She's throwing up a dense thicket of words to hide behind, as if enumerating a thousand disasters will make the one that's _killing her_ less mortal. Sometimes it even worked (back in the day), and it's not as if she can do anything else (here and now) because _there's nothing else to do._ She can't solve the unsolvable problem. She can't resurrect Jack. And she can't die. (And she can't decide, from one moment to the next, which of the three holds the most allure, because she's concentrating very hard on _not screaming._ ) But she's pretty sure she's got things under control (yes and no, more or less).

Until one day.

Her walks take her all over the ship. There's a lot of ship, granted, but her walks are long. And it might have been the better part of valor to stay away from Cam's quarters, except for the fact she hasn't known where they are (at any given time) for years. Both she and Jack were nesters and packrats, and as a result had picked a cabin (it was the Captain's Cabin, anyway) and stayed put. The others (even Teal'c) tend to move around. Vala likes to redecorate. 

They all know why Cam moves.

She isn't thinking about Cam the day she hears the banging against the door. If she had been, she'd have drawn the logical conclusion and kept walking. But she's too busy trying to keep from breaking down in the kind of wild hysterics that don't _solve_ anything and leave her exhausted and headachy and looking like hell. After which her two options are skipping lunch and worrying everybody, or showing up for it and worrying everybody. So she isn't thinking clearly at all when she goes over and slaps the doorswitch to open it, and when the door doesn't open, (still not thinking clearly), she flips open the lock-plate and taps in Jack's override code. (She'd known it for years and pretended she didn't, and he never changed it because he knew that if she ever used it she'd have to admit she knew it. But Jack is dead now.)

The door slides open, and she's just lucky that habit has her standing beside it and not in front of it, because half a set of free weights comes sailing through the doorway, thrown with enough force to make the far wall of the corridor ring. Cam has to know she's here by now -- or that _someone_ is -- but the sounds of destruction don't stop. She walks in. The door closes obediently behind her.

On _Odyssey_ there are big cabins and small cabins, and compartments that aren't cabins at all but who cares. You can have anything you want (except your freedom). And so Dani's always wondered why Cam has consistently shoehorned himself into the smallest available cabins on the ship. He's standing in the center of the room (a distinguished-looking, disheveled, silvering madman) holding a set of bookshelves over his head. Black T and BDU pants. She sees the muscles flex in his arms as he throws it at the wall. He pays no attention to her at all.

_He hasn't done this for a while,_ is her first thought (because the cabin looks as if flying monkeys have held a shivaree here) and the second, right on its heels, is: _I wish Jack was here; he'd know what to do._

And she can't stand it. Can't stand thinking it, can't stand holding it back, can't stand the pressure to grieve in quiet and tactful and suitable ways. She picks up the nearest thing to hand -- a small table -- and swings it at the wall as hard as she can.

The sound it makes as it breaks stands in for the sounds she refuses to make. She looks for something else to break.

Pottery (wheel and clay was Jack's hobby, Sam's is creating ceramics using the replicator, after she's modeled them using a computer program; the ones in here are Sam's, and Dani breaks them and then breaks the pieces), books (she rips them to shreds and the pages fly everywhere), boxes and tables and furniture. Everything Cam owns. Everything he's made. The only thing that survives more-or-less intact is the bed (built into the wall) and the mattress (too soft and heavy to destroy without knives). All the rest is splinters and shards.

They've been destroying his quarters together in companionable silence for maybe ten minutes when there's nothing left to break. And _she doesn't feel better._

She thought it was supposed to help.

She's shaking. She can feel it. Tiny tremors all through her body, visible only in her hands. Not fear. _Anger._ Breaking things is supposed to _help_ , and she broke things, and it didn't help, and _what does she do now?_

Cam turns toward her as if he's just now noticed she's there. She's only heard about these "redecorations" of Cam's second and third hand; she's always tried not to think about them (another way of creating privacy when there just isn't any) but she imagined he'd have to be angry to destroy his quarters.

The look in his eyes is of a desolation too deep for grief.

And she knows she has to fix it _(wants to fix it)_ and she doesn't know what to do _(dangerous even to begin)_ and she doesn't think she's ever understood Cameron Mitchell _(help me, Jack -- I'm no good with people!)_ and she ought to walk away _(everything's unstable right now and if she meddles she could make things worse)_ and she knows she isn't going to. Why didn't Sam? Why didn't Vala? Why didn't Teal'c? Why did they leave this to her?

It takes Cam two steps to close the space between them. She can count them, because each step grates over shards of broken clay on the floor. His hands come down on her shoulders with an abruptness that makes her jump; she was watching his face so fixedly she ignored the peripheral movements. There haven't been any threats in her world in a very long time.

"Half my life," he says, and his voice is a strained whisper. "Half my life."

He says it over and over, as his hands tighten on her shoulders, as he begins to shake her. Not hard, not violently; just in time with his words, and she wonders if this is what madness looks like, and is it really madness to see the truth, to tell the truth, because it _has_ been almost half his life, and Dani knows they're all going to grow old here and die, one by one.

She can't even remember what future she meant to have any more.

And when he falls silent at last, and his hands drop away, she discovers she's been whispering under her breath the whole time, her words a nearly-inaudible counterpoint to his:

_"--oh don't oh please don't go oh don't oh please don't go oh don't oh please--"_

He puts his arms around her, and they stand in the wreckage of his cabin, holding each other, for a very long time.

She wonders if Cam still wants her. (Twenty years is one hell of a long time to put a crush on hold.) She wonders if Vala would notice, or care, or object. She wonders if she can actually find the emotional strength to continue to get out of bed in the morning.

#

Cam moves again. She doesn't know where, but at least he's talking to her at meals again. He still (thank god) isn't asking her how she's _coping_. It's a question Dani doesn't know the answer to. She gets out of bed in the morning because Vala badgers her until she does, and if she actually manages to out-stubborn Vala, Vala goes and gets Sam.

Vala is a font of (undoubtedly completely inaccurate) information about the sexual vitality of the middle aged _Tau'ri_ male, and refuses to believe that Dani intends to give up sex. And she's also terrifyingly well informed about the nature of Jack's final orders _(as if Dani intended to follow these orders with any more fidelity than any orders he'd given her over the previous thirty years)_ , so Vala's either a really good guesser, had their cabin bugged, or both.

Two months after Jack dies, Teal'c pointedly informs Dani that her garden requires her presence. Not true in a closed environment where there are no weeds (and Sam even built a robot to cut the grass), but she's never won an argument with Teal'c yet. She wonders how he knows she hasn't been going there. Vala probably told him (she doesn't ask herself how Vala knows: that way lies madness).

But returning to the place she spent so much labor on at least makes her feel _something_. Jack always loved the garden. He bitched about it constantly, and teased her about it mercilessly (she's allergic to everything here, including the grass), and absolutely refused to do a lick of work on it ... and spent hours here. Stealing half-ripe fruit off the trees (every flower has to be pollinated by hand because there are no bees here in her brave new world) and never _once_ listening to her warnings that eating green apples would be its own punishment. And on the day she comes back here, she's survived two months. If she can survive two, she can survive three. Then three more. That's half a year. Two halves of a year make a whole, and anything you can do for one year, you can do for two. And once you've done something for two years, you might as well just keep doing it (that's how she got through the early years of the Stargate Program, anyway).

The trees she nurtured from seed (and lost ninety-five percent of her original plantings) are mature now. She thinks of a song that was old before Jack was born. _'Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me...'_ A novelty song from a war that the Good Guys won. Too bad she'll never know how _her_ war ended, isn't it?

"Hey."

She looks up, and Cam's crossing the (you might as well call it a) lawn toward her, looking dapper and uncomfortable. He's looking around in a way that tells Dani he's never been here before. "You, uh, you--" He gestures at the little orchard, and she nods.

Reading his face, his body language, she sees her work through fresh eyes, and sees its strangeness instead of its familiarity. Trees and green grass ... and grey bulkheads, and above them, banks of UV-shifted grow-lights. At least there isn't one of the windows, or portholes, or _whatever_ here in the cargo hold. She's reminded again of never-done projects: painting the bulkheads some other color, or covering them with lattice and finding something in the botanical samples that might consider behaving as a vine. She's been happy with her apples, her pears, her tulips and marigolds (though sometimes she's wished for roses, even though -- of all the flowers -- they're the ones she's most allergic to).

"Never took you for a gardener," Cam says, running his hand over the trunk of the tree as if he's inspecting it for design flaws.

"I, uh, I'm allergic to flowers," she says. It isn't what she meant to say, but she doesn't want to say the obvious things: that she needed a hobby, that they all needed hobbies, that they're trapped here on the _SS Damned_ and they're going to live out their lives here, and rot, and die, outside of Time, as irrelevant to their own future as if they'd died two decades ago.

"So you haven't been crying," he says gravely, and it's that deadpan teasing that finally undoes her completely, because it's something that he and Jack always had in common. She closes her eyes, and the tears spill hot and painful down her cheeks.

"Hey, hey, hey, baby, no, don't," Cam says, and she feels him gather her in, holding her, and she's missed being held, and admitting it (even to herself) feels like a betrayal. She's old and grey and full of years and nobody's baby.

"He said--" she starts to say, when she thinks she's got herself under control again, but she doesn't, and the words come out as a stuttering sob, so she stops.

"Hushabye," Cam says, holding her closer. "I know all about that. Vala told me. Just you hush now. You go ahead and cry over him. Jack O'Neill was a good man."

In Jaffa culture, the word for weakness and the word for death is the same word. The Jaffa sing songs of lament and burn their dead (when they can, when they could) but they don't cry. She's tried to be strong for Sam, and despite the fact that Vala is chronologically older, she's always felt as if Vala's somehow her little sister, to whom she owes an elder sister's care. In all the weeks since Jack died, Cam's the only one who's told her to go ahead and cry.

Every other time she's cried for Jack her tears have left her feeling as if she's been ripped open all over again, ending nothing, solving nothing. This time, when she's cried herself out, she feels exhausted and empty, but different. It's as if her grief had to be witnessed for it to matter.

"Here, now. Dry your eyes and blow your nose," Cam says.

She's expecting Kleenex, but he presents her with a pocket-handkerchief, large and square and white. She mops her eyes and polishes her glasses dry and blows her nose. "This is stupid," she says, regarding the crumpled soiled wad of cloth. (She certainly isn't giving it back now.)

"Naw," Cam says. "More eco-friendly. C'mon. Sit down." 

He lowers himself to the ground without too much stiffness, leaning back against the tree. He pats the ground beside him invitingly; she manages to get there, but knees and hips and back all remind her that she isn't a kid anymore and she's spent a lifetime abusing them. Oh sure, there was that whole Ascension thing, and the sarcophagus before that, but there've been a lot of years and a lot of miles since then.

He drapes an arm around her and she leans against him. She's exhausted; it would serve him right if she fell asleep right here. But she can't keep from wondering what Vala told him. The truth? (Does she know it?) _"Take care of Mitchell. Let Mitchell take care of you."_ (Oh, Jack, I don't even know where to begin...) She feels him lean his cheek against her hair. "Smell that fresh country air," he says.

_'Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me...'_

"Jackass," she says comprehensively, and stifles a yawn.

"How well you know me."

#

A month later Vala gets impatient (time cannot wither nor custom stale) and locks both of them out of their cabins, having arranged to move all of Cam's things and a selection of Dani's things into a new (larger) cabin (and notify them by intercom -- separately -- when each of them pings the Bridge to find out what the _hell_ is going on, and Dani would pay good money -- assuming she _had_ any money, and _Odyssey's_ economy had any use for it -- to know how Vala overrode her override code).

"We can... I can..." Cam says, staring around the cabin Vala's sent them both to.

Dani wonders if that sentence ends _"...kill Vala and hide the body"_ or: _"...get my things moved out really quick"_ or _"...make the best of it"_ because from where _she's_ standing, Vala didn't do this alone.

She walks past Cam and over to the bed. There's a transparent shocking pink marabou-trimmed peignoir set laid out on it. There's also an ice-bucket standing beside the bed. It has a wine-bottle in it. God knows what's in the wine bottle, though it's probably alcoholic.

"If you ever break anything I own, Cameron Everett Mitchell, I'm killing you myself," she says, and hears him laugh softly.

#

Years pass.

Cam's dark moods don't end, and Dani is grateful for Vala's presence. In their life and (frequently) in their bed. It's probably odd that a place she spent so brief a time (out of all the years of her life) has stamped its ways so indelibly on her psyche, but Abydos will always be home, and its ways, the ways of home. A man is entitled to the presence of his wives and concubines around him. (There is a part of her, too, that is grateful for the fact that Vala does not seek the title of "wife", for she would certainly be entitled to pride of place in Cam's bed by the customs of home. But Vala insists that she has no desire to be any man's wife, especially Cam's.) And at least with a wife there (to badger him and nag him and _drive him crazy_ \-- or so the Lord Of All He Surveys says now and then -- when his dark moods take him, they turn outward. Or at least turn toward the gym, where Teal'c is ready and waiting to beat him into exhaustion.

Of course, no marriage is perfect (hers and Jack's wasn't, though in a different way). Cam _does_ break (some of) her things. She demands that Sam replicate her a couch so she can make him sleep on it. (There's a perfectly decent couch in the Officer's Lounge -- as Teal'c points out -- and he even brings it down and puts it into the compartment next door, but since -- as Cam points out -- there's also a _bed_ in the compartment next door, it seems pretty much like an exercise in futility. Dani explains that it's a symbolic couch.)

She loves him.

Ten years, fifteen, and when she reckons up the years and realizes she's been aboard _Odyssey_ for thirty-five years, all she feels is panic. She's staring seventy in the face now, and seventy is staring right back.

She thinks Sam's given up trying to save them by now. But the Asgard database is too important to lose. She goes to Sam and suggests that they have to find a way to miniaturize it, put it into containers that will survive _Odyssey's_ inevitable destruction. If they're small enough and aren't giving off an energy signature, the Ori warships will miss them. It's true that the archives will probably drift for centuries and even millennia without being found. But that's better than them being lost absolutely and irrevocably.

And more than that, it gives Sam something to do.

#

On the day that she realizes she's been living on _Odyssey_ for more years of her life than she lived off of it, Dani goes and finds some place she won't be disturbed, and cries herself out. Compared to the life she could have had -- compared to some of the lives she narrowly escaped -- this isn't a bad one. But oh, she misses sunlight, and weather, and the seasons. She misses the Stargate. She misses _books_. Without the Asgard database to study she would have gone mad ... decades ago. As it is, each year now is a little more ground lost in the Parliament of Her. More aches and pains. Worse eyesight (and all the ship can do for that is provide magnifying lenses: the Asgard database isn't stocked with medical information about humans). They have no doctor (though they have an entire infinitely-reproducible pharmacy, for obvious reasons it isn't one geared to geriatric complaints) and no surgeon; when something goes wrong they treat the symptoms and hope. She's silently terrified for Cam, who carries the legacy of Antarctica written into his bones, and she remembers someone (long ago, and she can't remember who, memory's going, dammit) saying old injuries come back to haunt you when you get old, and old surgeries sometimes need to be re-done.

If Cam's many surgeries need to be re-done, if the need is crucial, the absence of such surgeries life-threatening, he will die.

He's stubborn and argumentative and contrary (the damned old coot; call _her_ a cradle-robber, will he?) and she can't bear the thought of seeing him suffer.

She can't bear the thought of seeing him die.

#

She can remember the texture of the Coverstone beneath her fingers as if it was yesterday. She can remember Jack's face the first time she saw him. And Cam, walking into her office and saying, "Stay."

She can't remember what she had for breakfast -- or even if she _had_ breakfast. She'd write herself notes, but holding a pen is more goddamned trouble than it's worth these days, and even she can't read her own handwriting anymore. Thank god Sam set her computer up with a voice-recognition capability a while back. And it can read her own notes back to her, too -- a damned good thing, since her glasses have been worthless for a while. (She doesn't need them for the Asgard database, which conveniently displays itself in glowing runes eight inches high. Small mercies.) Cam bitches that he spends half his days chasing her down from where she is and dragging her to where she ought to be. She tells him he should be grateful he's still useful.

(She's starting to worry that his memory might be going. People age by different genetic clocks, and equal isn't equivalent. She doesn't want to seek confirmation of her worry, any more than she wants to know how long she's been on this ship. Or how old she is, for that matter.)

And then -- one evening, at dinner -- Sam announces (in between "pass the salt" and "what's for dessert") that she's solved the problem of _getting them out of this goddamned booby-trap_.

There's a catch, of course. The solution comes too late. They've used the power they'd need to get out-and-away in their day-to-day survival. (Fifty years! And oh, she won't make a scene, but ... fifty years. She's -- they've -- spent _half a century_ trapped in here...)

It's Cam (her Cam!) who solves that problem. The Ori warships will provide the power to reverse time. But that means _Odyssey_ will be destroyed. Sam can extend the temporal field a little further and send them back to the moment before the time-dilation sphere was established, but that means someone has to stay behind. Outside the stasis bubble that will protect the rest of them from the destruction of _Odyssey_. Otherwise they'll simply repeat history and do this all over again.

Whoever stays outside the stasis bubble will retain their memory of the last fifty years. And they'll still be old. The rest of them? All this time, all these memories ... will be erased.

Sam says she should be the one who stays, but Teal'c overrules her. (He doesn't look much different, Dani thinks, than he did at the beginning.) She wonders if it would be better to remember your last love when they've forgotten you -- and hope that history will repeat itself -- or for both of you to forget, and hope for the same thing without even knowing that you're hoping for it?

And then, suddenly, she realizes that she doesn't get either option. If this works (instead of killing them all) and they end up back where they started, she'll be going back to _Jack_ , not to Cam. But Jack's been dead thirty years. It's Cam she loves.

She's far too old for grand gestures, even if she did want to leap to her feet and run weeping down the corridor. Cam pats her on the knee. He probably knows what she's thinking, the bastard.

"Bastard," she says later, when they're alone in their quarters. Thank god Sam's miracle (for once) won't be accomplished instantaneously. It'll take a day or two to reroute the power conduits throughout the ship into the Asgard core and to build the device to exclude Teal'c from the time-dilation field.

"Pretty sure my parents were married," Cam says.

"Don't try to change the subject," she says. "You... I'm going to forget you, Cam. I'm going to forget _us_."

"Don't see how, baby girl. I'm gonna be right there, same as always."

"Don't you goddamned _humor_ me, you contrarian jackass. You know damned well--" She wipes at her eyes angrily.

He wins the argument the way he always does, by putting his arms around her and just holding her. "Look on the bright side," he says, laughter in his voice, "we might all just die right here."

#

When the day and the hour come she and Vala wait with Cam on the bridge. (He's Vala's husband, too, even though both of them would deny it furiously.) Sam is down at the Asgard core. Teal'c is waiting for whatever comes in the garden. In moments, all those years of patient tending will be turned into everlasting fire. If this works, Teal'c will be the only one who remembers there was ever a garden there.

Teal'c will be the only one who remembers _them._

"I'm ready," Sam says over the intercom.

"Do it, Sam," Cam answers, and his voice is steady. Behind his back, Vala's hand reaches for hers. Vala's fingers are cold, Dani's hand is shaking. Vala's grip squeezes her hand painfully hard. Dani turns her face into their husband's shoulder and tries to hold onto this moment, this memory, hard enough to carry it with her forever.

###

**Author's Note:**

> A more complete archive of my work can be found at my [Dreamwidth Journal](http://ivory-gates.dreamwidth.org/3332.html)


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